The "Ah-ha" moment

I remember the scene vividly. I was walking out of a class on mediation with a friend and fellow dispute resolution scholar. As either a person with an internal equalizer or just an avid arguer, she tended to respond to pessimism with optimism and to optimism with pessimism. Therefore, after sitting through almost two hours of everyone high-fiving the mediation process, she felt the need to even things out (or just pick a fight with me, a fan of all things ADR). So she began to recount a mediation that she conducted in which one party became emotional and, when the other party offered the object of the dispute, turned off the emotion and snatched up the settlement. The moral of this story was, "What could the mediator do?" The parties had reached a settlement, and the mediator would lose their neutrality by calling out unfair negotiation tactics.

This scene became burned into my mind because it ignited something and sent my brain into overdrive. We just turned the corner when the moral of her story sank in, and it hit me. I stopped walking and, while fully taking in the art deco pattern on the adjacent wall, I thought, "Why not provide each party with a mediator to help them negotiate?" This question makes next to no sense to any expert on mediation and dispute resolution. But because I didn't know better, I was wrapping myself around all of the possibilities and benefits that this dynamic could spawn. This was my "Ah-ha" moment, a singular shift in my thinking from which everything else was to follow.

"What is it?" my friend asked. I was still frozen, staring at a wall. Embarrassed, I shook it off. "Uh. I just had an idea. It's nothing."